Bloomscrolling Is the Opposite of Doomscrolling, and It’s Not as Fluffy as It Sounds
Doomscrolling has had a remarkably fast rise through the English language. First used on Twitter around 2018, selected as Dictionary.com’s top trending word in August 2020, named the Macquarie Dictionary’s Word of the Year for 2020, and formally added to Merriam-Webster in September 2023 — it went from niche internet slang to dictionary-official in under five years. What’s interesting is that its natural opposite — deliberately curating your feed toward content that’s constructive rather than alarming — still doesn’t have that kind of institutional recognition, even though the behavior it describes is one a lot of people are already trying to practice. The informal name for it that’s circulating: bloomscrolling.
This isn’t really a story about a cute wordplay trend. It’s a story about what happens once a culture names a problem clearly enough that people start actively engineering workarounds for it — and what the current evidence actually says about whether those workarounds help.
What Doomscrolling Actually Is, Precisely
Dictionary.com defines doomscrolling as the practice of obsessively checking online news for updates — especially on social media feeds — with the expectation that the news will be bad, such that the dread from that negative expectation fuels a compulsion to keep looking for more. The mechanism isn’t really about the news itself; it’s about a feedback loop between anxiety and information-seeking, where each new piece of bad news doesn’t satisfy the anxiety that drove you to look — it reinforces it, which drives the next scroll.
Part of why this spread so effectively, according to Wikipedia’s documented history of the term, is that research has found a real gap between people’s awareness of doomscrolling and their actual behavior — people who initially claim they don’t doomscroll are frequently found, on closer observation, to be doing it anyway. Naming the behavior clearly didn’t automatically stop it. If anything, the term’s rapid spread during 2020’s compounding crises — the pandemic, the Capitol events, a contested election — made doomscrolling something people recognized in themselves after the fact, not something they could reliably catch and interrupt in the moment.
Where “Bloomscrolling” Comes From
Unlike doomscrolling, bloomscrolling doesn’t have a single documented coiner, a dictionary entry, or an official “word of the year” moment — it’s best understood as an emerging, informal counter-term that’s arisen organically alongside a handful of close cousins like “hopescrolling,” rather than a term with one clean origin story. What they share is the same basic reframing: instead of passively absorbing whatever a feed’s engagement-optimized algorithm serves you, you actively curate what you follow and search for toward content that’s constructive — solutions journalism, genuine good news, communities and creators focused on building rather than alarming.
It’s worth being precise about what this is and isn’t. Bloomscrolling isn’t “only consume happy content and ignore real problems” — that’s closer to information avoidance, which carries its own risks. It’s closer to deliberately counterbalancing a feed that defaults toward outrage and crisis, since that default isn’t neutral — it’s the product of engagement-optimized algorithms that have learned negative, alarming content holds attention more reliably than constructive content does.
Why Your Feed Defaults to Doom in the First Place
This part isn’t speculation — it’s the documented mechanism behind most major social platforms’ ranking systems. Content that triggers strong negative emotion (anger, fear, anxiety) reliably generates more engagement — more comments, more shares, more time spent — than neutral or positive content does. Engagement-optimized ranking systems, whatever their original intent, learn this pattern and serve more of what keeps you scrolling. You don’t need a conspiracy for this to happen; you just need a system optimizing for time-on-platform discovering, empirically, that dread works better than calm.
This is why “just don’t doomscroll” has never been especially effective advice on its own — it asks you to override a feed that’s actively, algorithmically working against that instruction. Bloomscrolling’s actual value proposition isn’t willpower; it’s changing what the algorithm has to work with by deliberately following and engaging with different source material, so the system has constructive content to optimize toward instead of only alarming content.
What the Research Actually Shows — Including the Part That Complicates the Easy Answer
This isn’t just an anecdotal problem. A 2026 scoping review published in the journal Mental Health and Digital Technology, following PRISMA-ScR systematic review guidelines, synthesized the existing empirical research on doomscrolling and found consistent associations across cross-sectional studies with anxiety, depression, stress, and reduced resilience. A separate study from Flinders University, surveying 800 university students across Iran and the United States and published in Computers in Human Behavior Reports, went further — finding that doomscrolling predicted higher existential anxiety specifically, and correlated with people becoming more pessimistic and more distrustful of others generally, not just anxious about the news itself. The researchers were careful to note this relationship was correlational rather than causal, but the pattern held consistently across both study populations.
Here’s the part worth being honest about, since it directly complicates “just bloomscroll instead” as a clean fix: that same 2026 scoping review specifically examined an experimental “kindness-scrolling” intervention — deliberately curating feeds toward prosocial, constructive content, essentially bloomscrolling under a research name — and found it produced only short-term affective benefits. In other words, the existing evidence doesn’t yet support bloomscrolling as a durable fix you do once and move on from. It looks more like something that has to be maintained as an ongoing habit, the same way the original doomscrolling habit itself is maintained — through repeated, active curation, not a one-time feed cleanup.
How to Actually Do This, Not Just Rename Your Doomscrolling
- Follow specific solutions-oriented sources deliberately, not just “positive” accounts. Outlets and creators that cover how problems are being addressed — not just that they exist — give an algorithm genuinely different signal than simply muting bad news.
- Engage, don’t just scroll past. Algorithms respond to interaction, not just impressions. Liking, commenting, or sharing constructive content teaches the system to serve you more of it; scrolling past silently teaches it nothing.
- Audit your current follow list honestly. Most people have never actually reviewed who and what they follow with “does this account’s typical content leave me more or less capable of acting on anything” as the filter.
- Set a specific, bounded context for hard news, rather than eliminating it. Bloomscrolling isn’t about avoiding reality — it’s about not letting an infinite, undifferentiated feed be your only lens onto it.
Where This Connects to the Rest of Your Digital Habits
If the root problem here is really about who controls your attention — you, or a system optimized to hold it regardless of your wellbeing — that’s the same underlying issue behind a lot of what we cover under AI and digital privacy more broadly. Our piece on the biggest AI privacy risk not being a hacker, but a setting you never checked covers a different angle of the same theme — that the defaults you never actively chose are usually working against you, not for you, until you go find and change them.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is bloomscrolling an officially recognized word?
Not yet, unlike doomscrolling, which was formally added to Merriam-Webster in September 2023. Bloomscrolling remains an informal, emerging term without a single documented coiner or dictionary entry — it describes a real, increasingly discussed behavior, but the vocabulary around it is still settling.
Is bloomscrolling just a nicer way of saying “avoid the news”?
No — that distinction matters. Avoiding hard news entirely is closer to information avoidance, which carries its own downsides (being genuinely uninformed about things that affect you). Bloomscrolling is about deliberately counterbalancing a feed that defaults toward alarm with constructive, solutions-oriented content, not eliminating difficult information altogether.
Why does social media show so much negative content in the first place?
Engagement-optimized ranking systems learn, empirically, that content triggering strong negative emotion — anger, fear, anxiety — reliably generates more comments, shares, and time spent than neutral or positive content. The system isn’t designed with malicious intent; it’s optimizing for engagement and discovering that dread is an effective lever for that goal.
Can changing what I follow actually retrain my algorithm, or is that overstated?
It’s a real mechanism, not just a feel-good idea — recommendation algorithms respond to interaction signals (likes, comments, shares, dwell time), so deliberately engaging with constructive content does shift what the system serves you over time. It’s not instant and it won’t fully override platform-wide ranking incentives, but it meaningfully changes your individual feed’s composition.
Do people who think they don’t doomscroll actually doomscroll anyway?
Documented research on the term’s spread has found exactly this gap — people who initially report that they don’t engage in doomscrolling are often later observed doing it regardless. Awareness of the term and the behavior itself don’t automatically move together, which is part of why structural changes (like what you follow) tend to work better than relying on willpower or self-monitoring alone.
Is doomscrolling actually linked to anxiety and depression, or is that overstated?
It’s well-supported, not overstated. A 2026 systematic scoping review in Mental Health and Digital Technology found consistent associations with anxiety, depression, stress, and reduced resilience across the existing research. A separate Flinders University study of 800 students in Iran and the US found doomscrolling specifically predicted existential anxiety and increased general distrust of others — though researchers note these relationships are correlational, not proven to be directly causal.
Does bloomscrolling permanently fix the effects of doomscrolling once you start?
Not based on current evidence. The same 2026 scoping review that reviewed doomscrolling’s effects also examined a “kindness-scrolling” intervention closely resembling bloomscrolling, and found only short-term affective benefits rather than a lasting fix. The realistic framing is an ongoing habit you maintain, similar to how doomscrolling itself is a maintained habit, not a one-time feed adjustment you make and then forget about.
Conclusion
Doomscrolling earned its dictionary entry because it named something real fast enough for the culture to recognize itself in it — and naming it clearly still didn’t make it easy to stop, because the behavior is reinforced by systems optimized to keep it going regardless of what you intend. Bloomscrolling doesn’t have that institutional recognition yet, but the mechanism behind it is the same one behind the problem it’s answering: feeds respond to what you actually engage with, not just what you say you want.
The practical version of this isn’t “be more positive.” It’s treating your feed’s composition as something you actively architect rather than passively inherit — following constructive sources on purpose, engaging with them deliberately, and auditing the rest honestly enough to notice when a default is working against you instead of for you.
